Understanding John Edgar Wideman

D. Quentin Miller

Description

A complete overview of an innovative and analytical author who rose from poverty

Among the many gifted African American authors who emerged in the 1970s and 80s, John Edgar Wideman is one of the most challenging and innovative. His analytical mind can turn almost any topic into an intellectual adventure, whether it is playground basketball, the blues, the prison experience, father-son relationships, or the stories he lived or heard growing up in the impoverished section of Pittsburgh known as Homewood. In Understanding John Edgar Wideman, D. Quentin Miller offers a comprehensive overview of Wideman's writings, which range from the critically acclaimed books of the Homewood Trilogy to lesser known writings such as the early novels A Glance Away and The Lynchers. Notably Miller includes the first scholarly analysis of Writing to Save a Life, Wideman's recently published meditation on the military trial and execution of the father of civil rights martyr Emmett Till.

In his fiction, nonfiction, and works that artfully combine both forms, Wideman has employed a multilayered and often difficult writing style in order to explore a wide range of topics. Miller tackles such topics as African American folk history, the intersection of personal and public history, the confluence of oral and written traditions, and the quest for meaning in nihilistic urban settings where black families struggle against crime, poverty, and despair. Miller also shows how Wideman's singular personal history is interwoven into his writings. His impressive accomplishments, including an Ivy League education and numerous literary honors, have come alongside family tragedies. By the time his sixth novel was published, both his brother and son were serving life sentences for murder, a source of anguish that he wrestled with in Brothers and Keepers and Fatheralong.

Wideman writes with such authority on so many subjects that readers frequently have no idea what to expect with a new publication. Understanding John Edgar Wideman is thus a necessary guide to a prolific, varied, and essential oeuvre.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Franz Fanon
• América
• The Other Hand
• Central conceit
• The White Devil
• Erudition
• Equal opportunity
• Ishmael Reed
• Matthew J. Bruccoli
• On Writing
• The Dozens
• Modernism
• African American
• John Edgar Wideman
• American
• Anecdote
• Black
• Frantz Fanon
• Caliban
• William Faulkner
• Arthur Rimbaud

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611178258
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
UNDERSTANDING
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
D. Quentin Miller

The University of South Carolina Press
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN: 978-1-61117-824-1 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-61117-825-8 (ebook)
Front cover photograph: Ulf Andersen, www.ulfandersen.photoshelter.com
To Julie
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Understanding John Edgar Wideman
Chapter 2
The First Three Novels
Chapter 3
Homewood Bound
Chapter 4
Brothers and Fathers
Chapter 5
Enter Philadelphia
Chapter 6
Creolizing Genres
Chapter 7
Wideman s Short Fiction
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank a group of students in my Selected African American Writers course (fall 2013) who resisted Hoop Roots so much that it made me look at Wideman more deeply than I ever had before. Thanks also to Suffolk University for granting me a sabbatical leave to get my work done and to the Boston Athenaeum for giving me a spectacular space in which to complete it.
CHAPTER 1
Understanding John Edgar Wideman
The point isn t replicating some other writer. The point is expressing myself, being myself.
Wideman, God s Gym , 173
I demand that readers meet me halfway, that they participate and think and open themselves up to confronting some stuff that maybe they haven t thought about before, some feelings they re not willing to own up to. To that extent the very nature of what I do means if I m not upsetting somebody, not getting under their skin in some way, what I m doing is probably not working.
TuSmith, Conversations with John Edgar Wideman , 144
These two epigraphs capture something of the defiance, confidence, and challenges of John Edgar Wideman s work. Wideman is a tough writer in every sense of the word: a man who has been hardened by the circumstances of his life, who writes about difficult subjects in a difficult style, and who is not afraid to examine wounds or even to dig deeper into wounds to analyze their causes and effects. His works resist categorization, and he does not fit neatly with the other African American writers who flourished in the post-Black Arts Movement era of the 1970s and 1980s. Toni Morrison might provide the closest comparison: both authors are concerned with black history (and both have a particular fascination with the murder of Emmett Till), both write about family, both are comfortable moving between esoteric allusions and black vernacular speech ( the academy and the street, 1 in Wideman s words), and both confront trauma and damage as they produce works that cannot be fully understood or appreciated in a single reading. And yet the comparison does not hold up for long. Morrison tends to focus on female characters, while Wideman s universe is predominately masculine. Morrison s works are rarely autobiographical, whereas Wideman s often are. As Keith Byerman has argued, Unlike Morrison, Wideman offers little optimism, at least in the first half of his career. 2 Finally, Morrison s works have been widely read and lauded, culminating in her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Although Wideman has been recognized with a MacArthur Grant and a handful of prominent literary prizes, literary history has not been as kind to him, and he has certainly not enjoyed the widespread readership that Morrison has.
Regarded as a quirky genius following the publication of his first three novels in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Wideman deliberately retrenched and reemerged in the 1980s to great acclaim with three works of fiction together known as the Homewood Trilogy (1981-83), his memoir Brothers and Keepers (1984), and a flurry of other books. This blistering output of impressive work continued into the 1990s. Since then, his writing has slowed considerably, and his works published in the last decade have not enjoyed anything like the attention his earlier ones received, particularly those from the 1980s. True to the statements that serve as the epigraphs above, though, he has never been a writer who sought mainstream fame or who pandered to readers who were not willing to do the hard work of engaging with the layers of his work. His oeuvre represents the relentless struggle to understand and communicate a difficult, complex vision. Readers who approach him casually are likely to be confused. Readers who dedicate themselves to his work are likely to be rewarded (if also exhausted) intellectually, aesthetically, and emotionally.
Life and Career
Wideman was born on June 14, 1941, in Washington, D.C. His mother, Bette French, and his father, Edgar Wideman, figure prominently in his fiction and nonfiction. It could even be argued that a primary tension in Wideman s work is an attempt to resolve the aspects of his parents personalities that trace back through their lineage: his mother s unstinting religious faith and perseverance versus his father s distant stoicism. His first name is an homage to his grandfather John French, a nearly mythical figure in his work, who exuded life and energy until his ignoble death in a bathroom. In Wideman s story Backseat, meditating on the nature of names, he writes, When I published my first novel, I wanted my father s name to be part of the record so I was John Edgar Wideman on the cover. Now the three names of my entitles sound pretentious to me, stiff and old-fashioned. I d prefer to be just plain John Wideman, but can t shake the Edgar ( All Stories 42). Metaphorically, Wideman cannot shake his family, or his fate, or his connection to his father, who is rendered as a distant figure, a bully, and an isolated old man at various places in his work.
Wideman was the oldest of five siblings raised in the Homewood and Shadyside neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. Shadyside was a white-dominated neighborhood, and although moving there afforded him certain opportunities through access to better schools, the family had to move back to Homewood because of financial struggles. Homewood was in a period of decline, and like his neighborhood, Wideman s family deteriorated over time. In a late story about his mother, Weight, he describes how she persevered in spite of a son in prison for life, twin girls born dead, a mind-blown son who roams the streets with everything he owns in a shopping cart, a strung-out daughter with a crack baby, a good daughter who miscarried the only child her dry womb ever produced, in spite of me and the rest of my limp-along, near-to-normal siblings and their children-my nephews doping and gangbanging, nieces unwed, underage, dropping babies as regularly as the seasons ( God s Gym 2). The dire circumstances of his family unfolded gradually over the course of his life. Wideman s upbringing did not forecast the remarkable (and perhaps exaggerated) family dysfunction detailed here. His Homewood years were not rosy, but they did not resemble this kind of devastation. Many of his renditions of his early family life describe a matriarchy in which his mother, grandmother, and aunts largely raised him while his father worked a series of jobs to support the family. Wideman had to take his masculine cues from his peers, particularly on urban basketball courts, which became a recurrent setting his work, especially in the latter half of his oeuvre.
Recognized for his intellect from an early age, Wideman was awarded a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he played basketball and studied the largely white literary canon, particularly the European modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, who influenced his early novels. His years at an Ivy Leag